


Allegiance

by scioscribe



Category: Moonlight (2016)
Genre: M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 09:15:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Chiron doesn't know how to tell where they're going.  (He doesn't know how to make scrambled eggs, either.)





	Allegiance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yasaman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yasaman/gifts).



Something about putting his fingers through the grating on Kevin’s windows reminds him of fooling with Teresa’s placemats way back in the day.  Get a look at this fool thinking he can work his way into the knit of somebody he loves.  Like Juan and Theresa couldn’t have done without him.  Like Kevin couldn’t.

Not like Kevin drove ten hours to Chiron’s place and said, “Hey, Black, let me crash here for a couple days, couple weeks.”

Chiron knows that down through the center of him runs a streak of wanting it’s good to hide even now.  So all right, Juan told him the truth a long time ago, he can do this and not be a faggot.  But the doing of it is one thing and the need for it’s another.  Kevin can’t cook fast enough to fill the hunger of all the years Chiron’s been missing him but it’s unfair, Chiron thinks, to stare a brother down like if you had it all your way you’d eat him alive, breathe him in and never come back up for any real air.  If he gets greedy, if he asks too much—

Well, he’s safe from that.  Chiron keeps each little thing he wants so small he can slip it inside his pocket and hide it if need be.  Right now all he wants is for Kevin not to know what day it is, not to know how long Chiron’s been staying with him.

“Man, you gonna sit there looking out the window all damn day or you gonna get into this kitchen and let me teach your ass how to cook?”

“I’m about to sit here looking out the window all day,” Chiron says, but he relinquishes the hold he has on the grating and stands.  Day ten of whatever this is and he still likes the way Kevin looks at him when he moves, like Kevin’s getting alive to him all over again.  Fresh observation each time like Kevin’s not tired of looking.

“Yeah, yeah, you know, your moms may not have ever taught you, but I can’t believe Theresa let you get by without helping out.”

“I always just did the dishes.”

“Well, this don’t work out, you can be my _lavaplatos_ , you like that?  My dishwasher.”  He laughs at Chiron mouthing the word without meaning to.  “Three years of Spanish in high school and all I could say was the Pledge of Allegiance, they oughta had some kitchen line boys in the classroom hollering at us, learn that right quick, all you need to know.  I mean, not the Pledge of Allegiance, but any useful shit you’d actually want to say.”

He has a dishtowel tucked into the waist of his jeans: worn nubbly cotton against smooth new denim.  Touch is another thing Chiron’s been missing.  When Kevin hands him a dishtowel too, the warmth of their fingers brushing together gets to him a little.  Not like he gets hard.  He just gets soft.

Kevin’s got the warmest smile of anybody in the world.  “There you go.  Looking professional.”

“I’m all equipped, huh?”

“You are.  Now you at least don’t _look_ like you don’t know what you doing.”

Chiron shrugs.  “Get by on that for a while.”

“Not in the kitchen, I tell you that much.  That’s the thing I liked about it first off.  You got to be at least a little real to make it—on the street, you can slide.  You can _seem_ like you something.  Nobody ever _seem_ like they could fry you up a little something and that impress you without them doing it.”

Chiron doesn’t know fake from real.  Sometime a while back he was almost in the way of getting into counterfeit money; somebody was saying most places now, you go out into the suburbs, those motherfuckers don’t know shit about cash money, all they got is Suzy Charge-a-Lot with her fucking MasterCard.  You pass a twenty and even if they look at it, half the time they don’t know what they looking for.  The brother giving him the pitch on it said the future was in the past.  All those ones and zeros, he kept saying, all those ones and zeros buzzing around through the air, man, first it must have seemed like you were just plucking money out of nothing, but it ain’t like that anymore.  Keystrokes and firewalls and FBI all sniffing around.  The future was in the past, you go back to what you know works, something you can touch with your hands.  Something you have that you can for-real let go of instead of dragging around behind you, tied to some password, some address.  All those ones and zeros.

He’d been right as far as it went.  Future was in the past.  Chiron just didn’t think he could ever walk away from it.

“Hey,” Kevin says.  “What you thinking about?”

“Computers,” Chiron says, half-honestly, and Kevin sort of laughs—hooks his thumbs through Chiron’s belt loops and pulls him close and kisses him, says when it comes to computers, he doesn’t know shit and if Chiron wants, he can slide all he likes on that.  Kevin will believe whatever he tells him.

But, he says, Chiron has to focus.  School’s in session.

They’re not doing anything more complicated than scrambling eggs, but it happens beat-by-beat, melodic like the jukebox: the slight slip of Kevin’s feet against the floor, the crack of an eggshell, the flick of a fork through a bowl.  People will tell you you got to use a whisk, Kevin says, but you stand your ground on that.  Don’t let nobody talk you into buying a whisk you don’t want.  Kitchens are full of shit people don’t need.

“I didn’t know there was so much tied up in it,” Chiron says.  He likes this lesson where Kevin still does everything and all he has to do is watch.  Watching comes naturally to him; watching Kevin especially.  “Like one half the kitchen warring with the other half over how you fluff up your eggs.”

“I’m just saying it ain’t a thing you have to shell out a lot of money to do.  You know, simple pleasures.”

“Yeah, I know simple pleasures,” Chiron says, and he dares to slip his hand under Kevin’s makeshift apron.

“Nothing simple about _that_ ,” Kevin says.  “Here, taste this.  Nothing simple about us either.”

Now he’s chewing but he hasn’t tasted a thing.  “No?”

“Could have been,” Kevin says.  “Maybe.  But I don’t guess there’s much point in sitting around saying it’d be nice if the world had worked how it should have worked.  You like that?”

“The eggs?”

“What I just gave you to taste, weren’t they?”

“Yeah.  They’re good.”

“I know by the look on your face,” Kevin says.  “You got no idea.”  He puts down his spatula and strokes the side of Chiron’s face, chin to cheekbone, his eyes so grave and concentrated it’s like they’re back together in the moonlight, the first time or the second time.  Anytime the sun goes down and he’s with Kevin it’s like his whole life is getting changed, one way or the other.  But it’s morning now, which makes it strange.

“It pays off in the long run,” Kevin says.  He starts serving up breakfast.  It’s nothing fancy, just the eggs and some sweet rolls in a plastic-sealed pack from the market, so it looks like something Chiron could have put together himself, which might be Kevin’s point.

Chiron follows him to the table.  “Tasting your cooking?  That I know.”

“Nah, simple pleasures, I mean.  You know, don’t let a thing get too complicated, don’t get wrapped up in it.”

Kevin has no placemats for him to dig his fingers into.  The kitchen table is nothing but scratched wood, oily-smooth and marked up from a lifetime of garage sales and then a couple years of Kevin, Jr. coloring right off his paper onto the tabletop itself.  There are gouges, but nothing with grip, nothing to hold onto.  He figured this would be the way of it.  Ain’t like what happens in bed always means what you think it’s gonna mean, or else everybody he knew would be married, else Kevin might as well still be with fine-ass Samantha.  Most things don’t get serious.  And, he hears, most especially things like this.

But him, he’s never been the kind to play things light.  If he was gonna be hard, he was gonna be as hard as he could be, he was gonna own those couple streets in Atlanta he trapped on.  If he was gonna leave, he was gonna go, let them sell of what he left in the apartment.  If he was gonna do _this_ , he was gonna do it.  In the end it hadn’t even felt like much of a choice.  One way or the other, Kevin had had hold of him for years.  Chiron didn’t even think about it anymore like did he love him or did he not love him, did he want him or did he not want him.  He was sure of the answers, but the questions weren’t the point.  The thing just was.

But for Kevin, maybe not.  He was all the time trying to get ready to hear that.

“That nodding again,” Kevin says.  He lines up forks next to their plates.  (Was there anything he didn’t do at the diner, Chiron asked him on day three, after a couple nights watching Kevin work, watching him cook and serve and bus and everything else.  Yeah, Kevin said with that smile of his, make money.)  “And all the time I know you ain’t listening to one word I’m saying.”

“I’m not listening, I’m not tasting the eggs, how you think you know what I’m doing or not doing?”

“Because for me you ain’t never been that hard to read.  Now sit down and eat your breakfast.”

“Simple pleasures,” Chiron says, not because he feels like saying it but because he thinks it’ll be something Kevin likes hearing from him, some confirmation that they’re on the same page, instead of not even in the same book.

“Now you’re getting it.  You do the things that can be simple like they’re simple and then you have the focus, the focus and the time, for the things that got to be more complicated.  Like us.  Or fitting you out with some useful skills so you can get some kind of job won’t make my probation officer shit a brick he sees us running around together.  Computers, if you like those.  Like I wouldn’t mind seeing you in some kind of button-up shirt, all white-collar.”

Chiron stills.  He finds a groove in the underside of the table that his thumbnail fits in.  “Time and focus.”

“Yeah, time and focus.”  Kevin covers Chiron’s hand with his own.  It’s a thing he never looks awkward doing, and he touches Chiron a lot, casually as well as intimately.  They’re two magnets clicking together over and over again.  “I didn’t spend all that time without you just to get it wrong now, you feel me?  You still being here, not driving back yet, I was hoping you felt the same way.”

Chiron says, “I want to breathe you in and not come back up for air,” and Kevin doesn’t look worried about that, doesn’t look like Chiron has said too much.  He doesn’t think there’s a thing left now that they haven’t admitted to each other.

So there’s no point in not giving Kevin everything he can, no point in not asking for all he wants.  This right here is all he needs to hold onto.  He turns his hand over and fits it against Kevin’s, palm to palm.


End file.
